Sherlock Holmes and Star Trek – A Beginners Guide
* 17 December 2012

So the internet has been set aflame these past few weeks with
the first glimpses of Benedict Cumberbatch as the mysterious John
Harrison in Star Trek Into Darkness. But this is not the
first time these two fictional worlds have crossed over with each
other. Star Trek and Sherlock Holmes have made several references
to the other in their time, and so here we present a guide to some
of those intersections, some just passing reference, others
explicit pastiche - with a minimum of 'Of Boldy Going' jokes.

"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains,
however improbable, must be the truth."

"How poetic" replies Doctor Leonard McCoy (Karl Urban) to
Commander Spock (Zachary Quinto) following his stating of one of
Sherlock Holmes' most famous lines - from The Sign of the
Four - on the process of deduction during the events of Star
Trek (2009), the film that preceeded Star Trek Into
Darkness and the appearance of BBC Sherlock's Holmes as the
villain. Indeed, Benedict's role in the film could be construed as
poetic itself as a result, and certainly when considering he is
playing against the character of Spock, another of popular
culture's great, logical geniuses. It is not however, the first
time that the Vulcan has uttered those words.

Eighteen years beforehand in reality, Captain Spock, as played
by Leonard Nimoy, spoke the phrase during the events of Star
Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991) while faced with a
suitably Holmesian mystery, and attributed them to an ancestor.
It's a subtle moment in a script littered with numerous other
examples of playful references that apparently transcend their
human origins - including Spock's earlier use of 'an old Vulcan
proverb' "Only Nixon could go to China", and the
consistent quotation of Shakespeare by Christopher Plummer's
Klingon antagonist General Chang. The line is also perhaps used
more aptly than in the 2009 film, where Zachery Quinto's
incarnation of the younger Spock is referencing the possibility
that the opponent the crew of the USS Enterprise NCC-1701 is facing
has travelled from the future - a fact the audience already knows
to be correct. In the case of the older film, it's uttered at the
heart of a scene where the crew is attempting to solve a genuine
conundrum that the audience is following along with them, with no
certainty of the solution - a sudden, genuine moment of
deduction.

But more importantly of course, with Spock mentioning an
ancestor as the originator of this phrase, we're faced with the
suggestion that this fictional alien is related to the Great
Detective in some manner - leading to a great deal of fan fiction
depicting Holmes as a disguised Vulcan marooned on Earth in the
nineteenth century, over a century and a half before the officially
depicted First Contact between the two species in the eighth Star
Trek film - Star Trek: First Contact (1996). Numerous
sources however suggest that Trek creator Gene Roddenberry had
imagined Spock as being a descendent of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on
his human mother's side. Whichever explanation you'd prefer to go
with, there's a nice and far deeper behind the scenes link to the
world of Sherlock Holmes that acts as a greater explanation of the
use of this phrase of deductive reasoning, and begins to resonate
again with a degree of that poetic symmetry we've already
mentioned, as the sixth Star Trek film was co-written and directed
by Nicholas Meyer, who wrote Sherlock Holmes: The Seven Per
Cent Solution as a novel and later film screenplay.

That story is acknowledged as one of the most famous pastiches
of Conan Doyle's work, taking the form of a lost manuscript written
by John Watson that takes the view that Professor James Moriarty
was an invented figment of Sherlock Holmes' cocaine addled mind,
and the events of several tales written by Watson were a cover to
hide his friend from any scandal. Meyer is by his own admission a
huge literature fan, and his screenplay for The Undiscovered
Country, as well as the second Star Trek film The Wrath of
Khan, are full of references to numerous famous works. But it
is Spock's reference to Holmes that has had the greatest impact -
by his own admission, he inserted it as a throwaway line that he
suspected only "Holmes buffs" to recognise, but in reality he says
he has never attended a screening of the film where its
significance is not spotted by the audience, often in ballistic
fashion. For further, final bonus points regarding this incarnation
of Spock, Leonard Nimoy played Sherlock Holmes onstage in 1976, in
a production of William Gillette's play Sherlock Holmes.

The crew of the Original Series are not the only characters in
Star Trek lore to skirt the edges of Holmes fiction however.
Perhaps much more explicitly, Star Trek: The Next
Generation, the first sequel television series, went all out
on the Conan Doyle on occasion. Starting early on in the first
season, Lieutenant Commander Data (Brent Spiner), the android third
officer of the USS Enterprise NCC-1701-D, began to form a
fascination with Sherlock Holmes and his use of logical deduction.
This memorably expanded in the second season with the episode
'Elementary Dear Data', where Data and his friend Geordi
LaForge (Levar Burton) assumed the identities of Holmes and Watson
on the ship's Holodeck, where they solved crimes for leisure - an
activity that proved to be almost the undoing of the entire ship
and crew. Data had memorised every solution from Conan Doyle's work
and solves every case presented to him instantly. Determined to
present a mystery that Data would be incapable of solving, LaForge
generates a holographic Professor Moriarty (Daniel Davis) that
becomes self aware and attempts to take control of the Enterprise.
Though the episode ends optimistically (and curiously in the case
of Moriarty, sympathetically), the narrative is revisited four
years later in the sixth season, where Moriarty once again emerges
and continues his attempt to gain full physical freedom from the
simulation. This pair of unusual episodes are quite fully versed in
the iconography of the Rathebone styled Holmes - but with an
enjoyable science fiction twist - and in the case of the second
episode 'Ship in a Bottle', a suitably complex mystery
narrative.

To wrap up though, this Star Trek and Sherlock Holmes crossover
does of course go both ways with the BBC incarnation of the
characters. Aside from John calling Sherlock "Spock" in an
exasperated aside during The Hounds of Baskerville, there
is a distinct - though still unconfirmed - air of similarity during
John's eulogy for his friend at the climax of The Reichenbach
Fall. "You were the best man, the most human... human
being that I've ever known" has a certain echo of Kirk's
farewell to Spock during Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan - "Of
my friend, I can only say this: Of all the souls I have encountered
in my travels, his was the most...human." In both cases, the
goodbyes are for characters thought deceased, having died before
both our eyes and those of the other characters. But of course,
both emerge as very much alive as the next instalments of their
adventures begin...

In a final sign of that poetic nature of things though, the
apparent similarity in the dialogue of the final scene of The
Reichenbach Fall certainly didn't escape the attention of Star
Trek II's writer, Nicholas Meyer - yes, him again - who remarked to
trekmovie.com - "I love new Sherlock; it's
nice to know they return the favor!" With the shared sense of
logic and deduction that forms the backbone of the most memorable
characters in both universes, and now with the lead actor of the
BBC series as the mysterious major villain in the latest adventure
for the crew of the USS Enterprise, this mutual acknowledgement
between Sherlock Holmes and Star Trek shows no sign of running out
any time soon.